


Again

by junebugrebellion



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Includes original trilogy and Force Awakens, Minor Leia Organa/Han Solo, Nothing is okay, very much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 04:51:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6180862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junebugrebellion/pseuds/junebugrebellion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia Organa loses everything. Twice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Again

In the same way she’s been able to feel things her entire life, Leia _feels_ Alderaan turn to ash and dust. It’s a hole in her chest, it’s a blade in her lung, it’s a million screams in one cacophonous harmony.

Until it isn’t.

The silence that comes after leaves her trembling. She’s not even sure she remembers being escorted to her cell. She stares forward, seeing without seeing. Her lungs ache, but from lack of breath or from that display, she isn’t sure. Everything is numb. Nothing makes sense.

Her entire planet, gone in an instant.

Slowly, she gains feeling in the tips of her fingers.

She stood by and did nothing. She could’ve strangled Tarkin for it.

Air begins to fill her lungs.

Everything she loved was turned to dust.

Her back straightens.

Well, she’ll just have to return the favor, won’t she?

By the time Luke Skywalker breaks into her cell, cold rage has filled the hole in her chest. It doesn’t fit well, but it fits well enough.

 

 

As soon as she hears word of plans to rebuild the Death Star, she finds out as much information as possible.

 _Never again,_ she promises herself. _Never, never again._

 

 

Han’s lips are the first place she finds warmth in three years. Something in her (shattered, pieced-together) heart skips as he tells her that he’s a nice man. She wants to believe him, and most of her does.

The next time he smiles her, just that little bit of cocky victory in the expression, she makes herself another promise. _They won’t take him, too._

When they do, she gets him back by nearly getting herself killed. The price is humiliation, enslavement, embarrassment, abuse. When she feels Jabba die at her hands, it’s a taste of something she never forgets.

She never admits that killing him felt _good._

 

 

The war is over.

Darth Vader is (not) her father.

Luke is her brother.

This was not the family she wanted back.

(When Luke tells her everything, she faintly realizes that in twenty-two years, she’s been orphaned twice.)

(When Luke preaches forgiveness, that’s the fact she holds on to.)

 

 

“You look stressed,” Han says when she sits up in bed, her back straight enough to please every etiquette tutor she ever had. Her braids are mussed up, but still perfectly pinned in place. As always.

“I’m fine.” As always.

She hears the bed creek but doesn’t look back, relaxing only slightly when his hand finds the curve of her waist. His touch is warm. “C’mon, talk to me.”

“Just the Senate meeting tomorrow.”

“What are you afraid of?” he asks. His arms wrap around her slightly, and it’s an unspoken rule that she never brings up how much he craves intimacy.

“Nothing.” His arms tighten around her. It’s not good enough. “ _Nothing._ ”

His lips find her shoulder, brushing a thousand sweet kisses over the scar she earned on Endor. She sighs. “They’ll love you,” he assures, kissing a little harder as if to prove it. “Everybody’s gonna fall in love with you as soon as they see you, Princess.”

 _Princess,_ he calls her. _Your Worship, Your Grace, Your Highness. Princess, Princess, Princess._

She wants to ask, but she never does.

_Princess of what?_

_Princess of ash and dust and a million dead souls._

“Mommy?” calls teeny tiny Ben from his bed, two seconds before Leia would’ve closed the door. The lights are out, he’s all tucked in, he’s had enough warm milk to put any normal four-year-old to sleep. But not this one.

“Yes, baby?”

“Something’s in here.”

She tries to hide how her face changes for his sake. “Want me to check and make sure?”

He nods, and she searches his whole room. Nothing under the bed, nothing in the closet, nothing hiding behind any furniture. But something is _wrong._ She can’t explain it, but she feels it. She _feels_ it.

“Why don’t you come sleep in my bed, honey?”

His little arms reach up for her, and she takes him, holds him close to her heart.

It takes a few nights, but Ben eventually crawls back into his own bed. He sleeps soundly. The feeling in his room doesn’t fade.

 

 

Han finds her weeping six hours after Luke takes her baby away to become a Jedi. For a long while, he just sits with her. “We know Luke,” he says sweetly, trying to hide that he’s been crying, too. “Luke wouldn’t let anything happen to him.”

She nods, letting him think that’s what she’s worried about.

They’re taking things away again.

She knows what happens to Jedi.

She just can’t believe it’s her baby who does it.

 

 

_Yes, she can. Of course it’s him. Of course it’s her son._

Luke is in exile.

Her son is trying to be her father.

Han is gone.

The First Order is building a weapon that might as well be the same one she was on thirty years ago.

 _Never again,_ she once promised.

The Senate ignores her, claims that she is too radical. Too hysteric.

Poe is taken, tortured, returns with awful things in her head, put there by her boy. Her best pilot, nearly broken by her own flesh and blood in the same way her father tore her apart.

When the entire Hosnian system is turned to ash and dust, she feels it, she nearly collapses. The same hole in her chest opens up and bleeds. In the midst of it all, she can feel just a single tug, a single thread, one scream in the midst of millions.

_Han._

The silence is even worse than the first time.


End file.
